Keep on beginning and failing. Each time you fail, start all over again, and you will grow stronger until you have accomplished a purpose - not the one you began with perhaps, but one you'll be glad to remember.
Anne Sullivan
Every renaissance comes to the world with a cry, the cry of the human spirit to be free.
Children require guidance and sympathy far more than instruction.
My heart is singing for joy this morning! A miracle has happened! The light of understanding has shone upon my little pupil's mind, and behold, all things are changed!
People seldom see the halting and painful steps by which the most insignificant success is achieved.
I cannot explain it; but when difficulties arise, I am not perplexed or doubtful. I know how to meet them.
I have thought about it a great deal, and the more I think, the more certain I am that obedience is the gateway through which knowledge, yes, and love, too, enter the mind of the child.
A strenuous effort must be made to train young people to think for themselves and take independent charge of their lives.
We are afraid of ideas, of experimenting, of change. We shrink from thinking a problem through to a logical conclusion.
It is a rare privilege to watch the birth, growth, and first feeble struggles of a living mind; this privilege is mine.
The processes of teaching the child that everything cannot be as he wills it are apt to be painful both to him and to his teacher.
The wrong things are predominantly stressed in the schools - things remote from the student's experience and need.
The Great War proved how confused the world is. Depression is proving it again.
I am beginning to suspect all elaborate and special systems of education. They seem to me to be built up on the supposition that every child is a kind of idiot who must be taught to think.
Our material eye cannot see that a stupid chauvinism is driving us from one noisy, destructive, futile agitation to another.
I'd rather break stones on the king's highway than hem a handkerchief.
Yes, I am proud, and very humble too.
The truth is not wonderful enough to suit the newspapers; so they enlarge upon it, and invent ridiculous embellishments.
We imagine that we want to escape our selfish and commonplace existence, but we cling desperately to our chains.
I need a teacher quite as much as Helen. I know the education of this child will be the distinguishing event of my life, if I have the brains and perseverance to accomplish it.
If the child is left to himself, he will think more and better, if less showily. Let him go and come freely, let him touch real things and combine his impressions for himself.
It's a great mistake, I think, to put children off with falsehoods and nonsense, when their growing powers of observation and discrimination excite in them a desire to know about things.
I think that there are some teachers that do a very good job of incorporating culture and history. And there are some teachers who could use a little more help in that area.
The immediate future is going to be tragic for all of us unless we find a way of making the vast educational resources of this country serve the true purpose of education, truth and justice.
Education in the light of present-day knowledge and need calls for some spirited and creative innovations both in the substance and the purpose of current pedagogy.
We are bothered a good deal by people who assume the responsibility of the world when God is neglectful.
Certain periods in history suddenly lift humanity to an observation point where a clear light falls upon a world previously dark.
No matter how mistaken Communist ideas may be, the experience and knowledge gained by trying them out have given a tremendous impetus to thought and imagination.
We have no firm hold on any knowledge or philosophy that can lift us out of our difficulties.
We all like stories that make us cry. It's so nice to feel sad when you've nothing in particular to feel sad about.
It's queer how ready people always are with advice in any real or imaginary emergency, and no matter how many times experience has shown them to be wrong, they continue to set forth their opinions, as if they had received them from the Almighty!
